TOYS. I've been in a steady relationship with "the hobby" for many years now. This blog is an attempt to rediscover MY hobby and provide motivation to paint MY toys and play MY games. The topics may wander to rugby, cricket and the x-box but feel free to skip those bit if you wish........ either of you :)

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Sunday, 27 October 2013

Before I go much further I want to make it clear that this isn't a whinge or moan, far more an observation and a musing.

Just recently I've had a lot going on in the real world and haven't managed to get up a lot of brush motivation recently which has generally been a good release for me, as I'm sure it is for many of us. I've always preferred to spend a few hours each spare evening getting something done.

But just recently having dug out the LOTR Orcs, Gob and Uruks I've found it hard to get going on them.

It then occurred to me that I've reverted to a case of you paint what you play. Recently it's been roleplay, board games, Dreadball (board game) and the occasional bit of skirmish so maybe not such a surprise.

So, to break the cycle I need to be get some other games in. Chris recently asked me about St Peytersburg and Zombiecide is hopefully winging its way to a doorstep so maybe skip through a few ages to a bit of survivor gaming......nothing to do with watching The Walking Dead this evening,..honest!

Saturday, 26 October 2013

Literally just back from ComiCon at Excel which I'd been looking forward to for weeks as my first time out at such an event. The plans was to have a geeky day out with some mates, pick up some new comic / graphic novels of interest and maybe expand the geek wardrobe.

On that basis the day was a success as my swag included all of the above and I got to meet one of Judge Dredd's colleagues! Comic wise I went for a couple of new independent series of zombie bears and a con-man making the best of his recent death. I'll let you know how they read.

Otherwise it wasn't quite what I thought it would be, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of cosply and cosplayers, many teenage (I felt my age somewhat), manga, anime and gundam on show. The stalls were crammed with related t-shirts, bags, jewellery, props, costumes, plush furnishings, crockery and a few toys.

The one thing that seemed to be somewhat lacking was, well COMICS! I enjoyed the Comic Village which was a number of aspiring artists of varying genres, inspirations and talents but made up maybe 10% of the floor space. Marvel had a reasonable stand and I spotted 3 other comic traders but other than that a trip to Forbidden Planet would have netted you a great deal more potential purchases. As for action figures and the like, barely a thing.

Having rocked up at 9am with our early entry tickets the place was already buzzing and by 1pm was utterly rammed, mainly with teenage cosplayers, at which point us old geezers had seen all that we needed to and the tactical withdrawal began.

As I stated at the top I got what I was looking for from the day but I didn't expect it to be quite so much hard work to do so. The scale of the the event quite simply puts Salute to shame but the title seems somewhat inaccurate. I've got no problem with a cosplay event aimed at teenagers that has a smattering of comic content (unintentional pun) but please just market it as that!

Thursday, 24 October 2013

So, picked up my Dreadball Season 3 stuff on Tuesday night at the club which involves two teams the Teratons and Nameless, plus nameless Spawn. No book as Mantic have run out, despite having them in the shops!, but I did get Wyn to for my Robots.

As DB is my game of the moment the Uruk / Orc prep has been put on the hold in favour of shiny-itus and some seriously cool figures. I'm thinking vaguely Aztec for the Teratons, probably yellows, golds along with some shell patterning. Nameless are definitely going SQUID, I'll google up some images to work from :)

Otherwise myself and Chris got in a game on the new pitch Forge Fathers (Chris) against Z'Zor (Me). I took the one Guard version and the advice I'd picked up to use the Strikers defensively deploying just the one in the 3/4 strike-zone.

I think it was first time out for Chris with the Stunties and the dice gods didn't seem to be overly keen on helping him out. Meanwhile my bug-boys somehow finally clicked for me with the big lad laying the slap on both of the Stunty Strikers while the Jacks, after a fashion, did everything that my gobbo variants never seem to be able to.

Admittedly Can't Feel A Thing is HUGE and definitely blunted the Stunty Slams while I went out of my way to make as much use of Slide as possible at one point making three dashes to make a 3 point strike. Another good fun game, always are with Chris, with luck rather than skill delivering me a landslide.

Additionally I finally picked up my replacement / missing Jack the other week and as it was a one off paint job I decided to have him as a somewhat albino version spraying him white and using layers of wash / drybrush to build up his colours.

Pretty pleased, and another 2 PPs in the bag though I realised on Tuesday that non of the Z'Zor are numbered so I'll have to sort that one out, just not sure how just yet!

Sunday, 20 October 2013

Finally finished off the MDF Dreadball pitch. It was one of those "organic" paintjobs where things developed as they went on. Fairly happy with the end result, a touch simpler than I had in my head I think I'm going to leave the subs boxes blank for the moment and maybe work on a graphic I like for the WAR-SPs and the Titans, though I'm now not sure if i want to go too specific.

Making more work work for myself I could get a few more subs boxes cut and then do one for each of my teams. Cool but a lot of work, something to think about. As a paintjob it wasn't overly demanding or technical but did take a while so I'll have a vaguely random 8 Painting Points thanks.

SO, for the moment Dreadball is a fully painted project, something of a rarity, just need Season 3 to turn up!

Friday, 18 October 2013

After a cancellation or two we managed to get back to Dark Heresy last night and picked up where we left off, in the belly of a space hulk full of Dark Eldar nasties.

Continuing on we soon found ourselves in a relatively intact Imperial Battleship of some kind. The church like interior tends to be a giveaway but the fact that all the lights were on without anyone was all a bit spooky.

As we advanced behind Brother Sergeant HardAsFeth, with myself skulking in any shadow to be found, we were soon enthusiastically greeted by a pair of warp-beasts one whom was running along the vertical wall. Playing fetch with high velocity projectiles I quickly failed a Perils of the Warp and then a Fear check to attack the nearest thing to me,....Sergeant HardAsFeth! This proved repetitive for me during the evening :/

With Bouncer and Rover dispatched the corridor from which they'd bounded took a strange writhing appearance which proved to be about a hundred of their pack mates.

Sarge turned barking an order to rapidly tactically redeploy in the opposite direction only to find us well on our way.

Finding a fortuitous passageway which soon cut through what appeared to be an asteroid Sarge turned heroically to hold them off a la Arnie,...if only he'd had a cape and a wind machine. Preservationists that we are we let him trying to tune out his death rattle over the comm a few minutes later.

Emerging into some form of asteroid cave we spied the prow of a big black ship in the corner. As a psyker I quickly identified it as Imperial having served on one previously. I even managed to work out that a lot of the hexagramic wards had been breached and despite finding an open airlock we didn't fancy it much.

Almost as if by magic the Auspex sputtered into life revealing our impending encirclement by the beasties. It was almost as if they were herding us towards the Black Ship..... Ah, hello adventure train, almost missed you!

Making all appropriate haste we all failed our Perception checks to the tune of a cocked gun and "Halt!". MrC looked smug until just one word "Spasm". At that point we got a description of four humanoids who we somehow apparently identified as another group of Inquisitorial acolytes.

"They're just four guys in armoured spacesuits like ours on a hulk pointing guns at us"

"You can see a variant Inquisitorial seal on one of them!"

"We can spot that but not the fact that they were stood there waiting to ambush us? Excuse me for having trust issues!"

"Are you really going to Spasm them?"

Cue conversation about the free will of the party, it wasn't just me, as the instant blamanche mix came out of the cupboard. So, the Spasm roll went big putting two of them on the floor with an accidental discharge into a third and I failed another Perils of the Warp flipping myself into the floor. While I dusted myself off guns were pointed until everything cooled down and the blamanche mix stayed sealed.

At this point the adventure became impatient and beasties started flooding into chamber sending us all running for the Black Ship. Piling inside we decided to task our new allies, who we'd named Team Moron, with guarding the door whilst we set off in search of the Saint's sword. They didn't seem so keen so I decided to Compel thier leader. I say, is that instant blamanche mix I smell?
As and opposed Leaderhip test I passed by 36 while putting a -10 onto el laddo.......who passed by 37...no dice! I was however awarded 4 corruption points for apparently trying to kill a member of the Inquisition.
Ah custard doughnuts, I was wondering if we had any in.

Moving through the ship we soon met a bunch of psykic ghosts who generally bickered with each other whilst making grand speeches at us. After I failed my Fear check and had to be subdued we got them to skip to the end had them lead us to not only the Saintly Sword but the Saint herself, stuck in stasis, and a copy of Liber Daemonica which we had away and headed topside for the conveniently available escape pods. Chatter turned to sabotaging Team Moron's ride which met with grim annoyance.

Once again the adventure kicked us along with the beasties finding thier way past the wards and into the ship with 20 minutes of prep time left on the escape pods.......

So there we finished, with our regular heart to heart about letting the group make thier own decisions and mistakes, we'll take things more seriously......honest :)

Thursday, 17 October 2013

In between putting down another break out of LIFE I've slowly been working on my MDF Dreadball pitch mainly sorting out the block colours for the main scheme.

Want to have it as the shared ground for my Corp, New London WAR-SPs, and Orx, Tohn-Ghaa Titans the main colours need to be black, white, red and yellow which all worked well enough in my head but has been rather trial and error.

The block colours are in and to be honest feels a little busy. I'm looking to shad the black, white and metallic with a blue/purple wash and the yellow and red with a red/brown wash.

After that a bit of dry-brush highlight and detailing. Currently my thoughts are black and white for the detailing and some sort of team graphic for the reserve boxes.

Too much? Grateful for your comments. The weekend should hopefully see a result :)

Saturday, 12 October 2013

Myself and Rich went back upto to Wargames Workshop in Milton Keynes today for a couple of demo / exhibition games of Dreadball Extreme. There were only a couple of us so we got in a three-way and a four-way before calling it and afternoon but they were good fun games.

I took Z'Zor while Rich took his Stormtrooper Zees, which are good fun and I learnt plenty about both teams. Rob#1 took Nameless and then Orx with Rob#2 joining the second game with Corp. The wins went to Nameless and the Corp reinforcing the feeling that DB-Ex is most definitely a Striker's game.
We did have the Giants but didn't end up playing with them so something for another day.

While we were there I stocked up on paints, even making a list and checking my stock! As they were there I decided to pick up some of the P3 offerings to try them out as I've heard good things and I kind of miss what was the GW Foundation range.

I did find myself thinking that I should really inventory my paints and spreadsheet them........then again, maybe not eh? :)

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Lots of multi-player board gaming over the last couple of day which has been thoroughly enjoyable as a reinforcement of the social side of our geeky little hobby of geeky little men :)

First up on Tuesday night at Enfield Gamers Rich cracked out his newly arrived copy of Dreadball Ultimate and we soon had a five way game going.

As another one play impressionistic review it was good fun that I'd be happy to repeat any time soon.

In short you get your whole team with 5 on the pitch with 3 actions per turn. The game is 7 turns, of a rush a piece, with a bonus event card each time round. There are 2 balls in play with the possibility of a 3rd via the event cards.

Menage a trois? Not the good kind!

For a first time out we played through in two hours. Player activation is randomly drawn each turn and seems to make for a more reactionary game of opportunity rather than grand strategy or the long game.

We did notice the opportunities to make use of your opponents threat hexes on potential targets and the scope for ganging up on the game leader is massive. I'm sure tables would turn like a turnstile!

Aaaarrrghhhh!! Fecking Veermyn strikers! :/

This is reinforced by the scoring system where you'll score higher for strike zones farther from your base. The real twist is that you loose a point everytime someone scores in your zone. Any lead could be reeled in pretty quick!

The pitch was definitely cluttered and the feeling I got was the more "elite" and adaptable teams could become more so compared to those more reliant on mutual support. I'm sure that a lot of that is the need to adapt current tactics which is never a bad thing.

We had 4 different races on the pitch and my Veermyn struggled, not managing a single successful strike. Fortune likely favours the bold in Dreadball Ultimate.

After a landslide Corp win we moved onto Formula D which has been getting a fair bit of game time recently and continually reminds me of the Pole Position cartoon.That's the way we play it, full throttle, though it comes with greater tactical subtlety than you'd think. You can race as F1 / Indycar or Fast and Furious street racing.

We've not got onto the advanced rules yet where damage goes to specific car systems for specific results. You can also design your own cars and drivers.

BoardGame Geek has THIS to say which I wouldn't disagree with. Infuriating or sublime dependant on your dice myself, Rich, Shaun and Mr C managed another two run outs last night to follow on from Tuesday and were more than happy to so.

Saturday, 5 October 2013

LIFE has been getting in the way again but Saturday I managed a trip upto Wargames Workshop in Milton Keynes with Rich J and Shado for Gaurdians of Tyr final Dreadball event of the year. It was something of a typical event for me, haven't played in a while, list written on the day, just looking for a few fun games.

As posted sometime I had intended to take Veermyn to the next tourney and had worked out that my extra 20MC was all going on four skill upgrades. However, having read a blog the other day about how to get the best out of Orx and Gobbos I was somewhat torn as greenskins have always been my thing.

So rocking up bleary eyed with a large Costa in hand I flipped a coin.....Orx and Gobs then!

Main advice was not to be backwards with laying the Smack-Down, so I did and against my own expectation I did alright with 2 wins, 2 losses and just the wrong side of an almost draw. Almost all were pretty good games so no complaints. I almost took Most Violent Player with 7 kills, 5 in game 2 (sorry Pete) but an utter dice stuffing in game 4 put pay to that one.

My bonus 20MC went on an extra Guard and a Coaching Dice. After the event I'd definitely go for an offensive coach, almost everyone I played against had a coach and they're very effective. The day was run as a five game mini-league which had seemed a bit keen on paper but all ran smoothly enough on the day and helped give the day the softer competitive edge that.

So, good day out, learnt a few (toys) things and most importantly I came home wanting to play more of the game I'd been playing all day. Result :)